This is the time, now that we have passed the threshold of a new era, when old landmarks are disappearing everywhere around us as we gaze, and the Old England that we have known is being dispossessed and disestablished by a new and strange, an inhospitable and alien England of foreign plutocrats—this is the psychological moment for a brief review of what this England of ours was like in the old days of stage-coach and mail.

If we could recapture those times we should find them spacious days, of much fresh air, illimitable horizons, a great deal of solid, unostentatious comfort for the stay-at-homes, and also of much discomfort for the traveller; but although no sensible person, fully informed of the conditions of life in the long ago, would wish he had been born into those times, yet among their disadvantages and the discomforts incidental to travel scarce more than two generations ago, there were to be found, as a matter of course, not a few things which would be looked upon with rapture by the modern sentimentalist. That was the era when the Suburb was unknown anywhere else than around London, and even London’s suburbs were sparse, scattered, sporadic, and separated by great distances from one another. Taking coach from the City, where the merchants and the shopkeepers commonly lived over their business premises, you came presently, north, south, east, or west, through suburban Stamford Hill, Sydenham, Clapton, or Kensington, to rural Edmonton, Croydon, Romford, or Chiswick, and so presently to the Unknown. That was, of itself, a charm in the old order of things—a charm lost long since in these crowded times, when constant and intimate travel have made us familiar with distant towns, and by consequence incurious and incapable of surprises. Everything is known, if not at the first hand of personal observation, at least by proxy of our reading in guide-book history, or by the debilitating photograph, which leaves nothing to the imagination, and renders us travelled in the uttermost nooks and corners of the land, even though we be bedridden, or thoroughgoing habitués of the armchair and the fireside. The picture-postcard—the lowest common denominator of the photograph—has come to give the last touch of satiety, the final revulsion of repletion. The Land’s End has long since been exploited, John o’ Groat’s is merely at the end of a cycle ride, the “bottomless” caverns of the Peak have been plumbed, every unscalable mountain climbed. “Connu!” we exclaim when we are told any fact. No surprises are left. We may never before have journeyed to Edinburgh, but photographs have rendered us so long familiar with its castle and rock that we cannot recollect a time when we were not familiar with the physical geography of the “modern Athens,” and we seem to have been born with a knowledge of the geographical peculiarities of every other place. We are, therefore, naturally bored and unresponsive in situations where our grandfathers were surprised and delighted; but although possessed thereby with a profound dissatisfaction with ourselves, we cannot hope to win back to the unsophisticated joys of old time.

Would that it could be done! The wish is everywhere evident, but only Lethean waters could sweep away the useless lumber of mental baggage that destroys imagination and blunts the senses. The many efforts made to bring back the “properties”—to speak in the theatrical sense—of old time are pitiful or ridiculous, as your humour wills it. These are the days when things quaint and old-fashioned are revived for sake of their quaintness, sometimes in spite of their inconvenience and unsuitability; when ingle-nooks and open hearths with fire-dogs are built into modern houses for effect, although slow-combustion stoves are infinitely more comfortable and less wasteful of fuel. Our forbears, who did not know slow-combustion stoves, were not the creatures of sentiment that we are, and would soon have abolished open hearths for the close stoves had they been given the chance, just as they would have exchanged the tallow dip for electric lighting had the opportunity offered. We do not know the feelings with which the first gentlemen to use carpets abolished the old rush-strewn halls and the manners and customs contemporary with them; but if their sense of smell was as acute as our own, they must have noticed with great relief the absence of the dirt and festering bones that found a hiding-place beneath those rushes. All the marvellous changes in habits of living—the cheapening of food, the conversion of the luxuries of a former age into the ordinary requirements of this, and even the alterations in the face of the country and the houses of towns and villages—are due to those increased facilities of intercourse which, owing to the gradual improvement in roads, the coaches and waggons of yore were first able to give. When public vehicles began to ply into the country, this England of ours was not only a land of wide unenclosed heaths and commons, but the people of one county—nay, even the inhabitants of towns and villages—were markedly different in thought and prejudices, in speech and clothing, from those of others; while local style in building, and the various building materials obtained locally, gave each successive place that appearance of something new and strange which the traveller does not always meet with nowadays in far distant lands. As the drainage of lakes and fens, the filling up of the valleys and the reduction of the hills, have quite revolutionised the physical geography of wide areas, often changing the natural history of the districts affected, so has cheap, constant and quick travelling and conveyance of materials helped to reduce places and people to one dead level. Romance flies abashed from the level, monotonous road, where, years before, in some darkling hollow between the hills, ringed in by dense woodlands, it lurked in company with the highwayman. We do not desire the return of those gentry, but what would literature have done without them? Highway and turnpike improvements long ago sliced off the most aspiring hilltops, and, carrying the roads through cuttings, used the material thus cut away for the purpose of filling up the gullies and deep depressions. Where the early coaches toiled, often axle-deep, through the watersplashes formed by the little rills and streams that ran athwart the way, later generations have built bridges, or have done things infinitely worse; so that a watersplash has become a rare and curious object, noteworthy in a day’s journey. Only recently, on the Dover Road, near Faversham, has such a watersplash—one of the most picturesque in the country—been abolished. Ospringe was a little Kentish Venice, with a clear-running shallow stream occupying the whole of the roadway, with raised footpaths for pedestrians at either side, and ancient gabled cottages looking down upon the pretty scene. Alas! the sparkling stream now goes under the road, in a pipe.

In the old days, no traveller going north along the Great North Road left Alconbury without first seeing that the priming of his pistols was in order, while the passengers by mail or stage secretly put their watches and jewellery between their skin and their underclothing, or deposited their purses in their boots, before the coach topped Alconbury Hill. For at “Aukenbury,” as Ogilby in his old road-maps styles it, you were on the threshold of a robbing-place only less famous than Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, or those other notorious dark or daylight lurks (for day or night mattered little in those times), Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common. The name of this ill-reputed place was “Stonegate Hole.” It is marked distinctly on the maps of Ogilby and his successors, between the sixty-fourth and sixty-fifth milestones from London, by the Old North Road, measured from Shoreditch, and passing through Ware, Royston, and Caxton.

Passing Papworth Everard, you came in those days, on the left hand, just before reaching the fifty-sixth milestone, to “Beggar’s Bush,” where you probably saw the tramps, vagrants and footpads of that age skulking, on the chance of robbing some traveller unable to take care of himself. Here, in sight of these wretches, you ostentatiously toyed with your pistol holsters, or loosened your sword in its scabbard, and so passed on scathless. On leaving Alconbury, however, the horseman generally preferred company, because the highwaymen of Stonegate Hole were well armed, and, by consequence, courageous.

What, exactly, was Stonegate, or Stangate, Hole? It was the deep and solitary hollow that then existed at the foot of the northward slope of Alconbury Hill, known now as Stangate Hill. The name derived from this road being a part of the old Roman “Ermine Street,” formerly a stone-paved way, and the “Hole” was formed by a rise that immediately succeeded the descent. Quite shut in by dense woods, it was an ideal spot for highway robbery. When, in the later coaching era, the road was lowered through the crest of the hill, and the earth was used to raise it in the hollow, Stonegate Hole disappeared. Bones were found during the progress of the works, supposed relics of unfortunate travellers who had met their death at the hands of the highwaymen. A more or less true story was long told of an ostler of the “Wheatsheaf,” the inn that once stood on the hilltop. He, it seems, used to help in putting in the coach-horses when the teams were changed, and would then take a short cut across the fields, and be ready for the coach when it came down the road. The coachman, guard, and passengers, who did not know that the shining pistol-barrel he levelled at them was really a tin candlestick, were duly impressed by it, and yielded their valuables accordingly.

A tale used to be told of one of the old “London riders,” or “bagmen,” who lay at the “Wheatsheaf” overnight and set forth the next morning. His saddle-bags were full, and so weighted with samples of his wares that he could scarce sit his horse, and had to be helped into the saddle by an ostler. Once up, his eyes only with difficulty peered over this mountainous weight, but in this manner he set forth. He had not gone far before he thought he had lost his way, when fortunately he perceived another horseman, and hailed him. The stranger took no notice; and so our traveller ranged up alongside him with the question. Instead of replying, the stranger thrust his hand into his breast-pocket and withdrew what the traveller imagined to be a pistol. Recollections of the evil repute of the place suddenly rushed into the traveller’s mind, and, putting spurs to his horse, he dashed away from the supposed highwayman, and did not draw rein until in the neighbourhood of Huntingdon.

There he met a party of horsemen, who determined to hunt the highwayman down, and so, with the traveller, hurried on to Stonegate. “There he is!” cried the traveller, as they came in view of a peaceful-looking equestrian, ambling gently along.

“You are mistaken, sir,” said one of the party: “that is our Mayor, the Mayor of Huntingdon.”

But the bagman asserted he was right, and so, to end the dispute, the whole party rode up, and one wished “Mr. Mayor” good morning. It was indeed that worthy man, and although he again, instead of making answer, drew something from his pocket, it produced no alarm among his fellow-burgesses, for they at least knew him for a very deaf man, and had often seen him reach for that ear-trumpet which he now drew forth, clapped to his ear, and asked them what it was they said.

Swift, who, travelling between London, Chester, Holyhead and Dublin, remarked upon the many nations and strange peoples he passed on the way, serves to emphasise these notes upon the fading individuality of places and people. The dialect of “Zummerzet” has not wholly decayed, but it has become so modified that when old references to its Bœotian nature are found, the reader who knows modern Somerset, and does not consider these changes, concludes that its grotesque speech was greatly exaggerated; just as he cannot be made to implicitly believe the remarkable and oft-repeated story told by William Hutton of the visit of himself and a friend to Bosworth in 1770, when the people set the dogs at them, for the only reason that they were strangers; or that other tale of the savagery of the Lancashire and Yorkshire villagers, who, when a person unknown to them appeared, conversed as follow:—

“Dost knaw ’im?”

“Naya.”

“Is’t a straunger?”

“Ay, for sewer.”

“Then pause ’im; ’eave a stone at ’un; fettle ’im.”

No inoffensive stranger in country districts is likely to meet with that reception nowadays. The stranger in those times was regarded, as he generally is in savage countries, as necessarily an enemy; but travel has changed all that, and it has been reserved for the London “hooligan,” who has been taught better, to perpetrate, in the very centre of civilisation, the barbarous methods of the uninstructed peasantry of generations ago.

Stories like these are only incredible when the circumstances of the age are unknown. In times when a stranger might easily enough prove to be a highwayman, or at the very least, some Government emissary intent upon collecting hearth-money, window-tax, or one of the very many duties then levied upon necessaries of life, a strange face might be that of an enemy, and at any rate was unlikely to be that of a friend. Sightseers were unknown. No one stirred from home if he could find an excuse for staying by his own fireside. “What do you want here?” asked the Welsh peasants of the earliest tourists; and declined to believe them when they said they journeyed to view the Welsh mountains. “For Christianity’s sake, help a poor man!” implored an early traveller in Scotland, fainting by the way. The door was slammed in his face. “Surely you are Christians?” exclaimed the unhappy man. “There are no Christians here,” replied the half-savage Scot: “we are all Grants and Frasers.” That last is, perhaps, rather a savagely humorous than a true story, but the mere existence of it is significant. More authentic—nay, well established—is the statement that even so late as 1749, in Glasgow, two people of the same name would commonly be distinguished by some physical peculiarity; or else, if one was travelled and the other not, the one who had been to the capital would be “London John,” or James, according to what his Christian name might be.

A course of reading in the “travels” of the authors and diarists who ambled about England, on horseback or otherwise, in the old days, sufficiently demonstrates the aloofness and isolation, and the essential differences that divided the country districts. When the Dukes of Somerset resided at Petworth, in Sussex, the roads were so bad that it was next to impossible to get there, and when once there it was equally difficult to get away. Petworth is only forty-nine miles from London, but the Duke of Somerset maintained a house at Godalming, sixteen miles along the road, where he could halt on the way and pass the night. His steward generally advised the servants some time before his Grace started, so that they might be on the road “to point out the holes.” When the Emperor Charles VI. visited Petworth, his carriage was attended by a strong escort of Sussex peasants, to save it from falling over. In spite of their efforts, it was several times overturned, and that was a very sore and bruised Emperor who supped that night with the Duke. Similar adventures befel Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne, visiting Petworth from Windsor. He went in some state, with a number of carriages. “The length of way was only forty miles, but fourteen hours were consumed in traversing it; while almost every mile was signalised by the overturn of a carriage, or its temporary swamping in the mire. Even the royal chariot would have fared no better than the rest, had it not been for the relays of peasants who poised and kept it erect by strength of arm, and shouldered it forward the last nine miles, in which tedious operation six good hours were consumed.”

The travellers of that era, knowing how strange the country must be to most people, gravely and at length described places that in these intimate times an author would feel himself constrained to apologise for mentioning, except in a personal and impressionistic way; and they not only so describe them, but there is every reason to believe their writings were read with interest. More interesting than their dry bones of topographical history are the accounts they give of manners, customs, and thoughts common to the time when travellers were few and little understood. When, in 1700, the Reverend Mr. Brome, rector of the pleasant Kentish village of Cheriton, determined to make the explorations of England that took him, in all, three years, he was obliged, as a matter of course, to wait until the spring was well advanced and the roads had again become passable. Setting forth at last, one mild May day, his friends and parishioners accompanied him a few miles, and then, with the fervent “God be with you’s” that were the parting salutations of the time, instead of the lukewarm “Good-bye’s” of to-day, turned back home-along, and expected to hear of him no more. But he did return, as his very dull and jejune book, chiefly of stodgy historical and topographical information, published in 1726, sufficiently informs us.

“Weeping Cross” is the name of a spot just outside Salisbury, supposed to have taken its name from being the spot where friends and relatives took leave of travellers, with little prospect in their minds of seeing them again. There is another “Weeping Cross” on the London side of Shrewsbury, near Emstrey Bank, about a mile from the town and overlooking the descending road, whence the progress of the travellers could be followed until distance at last hid them from view. There are, doubtless, other places so named throughout the country. The oft-repeated legendary statement that travellers usually made their wills before setting out is thus seen to be reasonable enough, but it is specifically supported by the author of Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, who, writing about 1730, says: “The Highlands are but little known, even to the inhabitants of the low country of Scotland, for they have ever dreaded the difficulties and dangers of travelling among the mountains; and when some extraordinary occasion has obliged any one of them to such a progress, he has, generally speaking, made his testament before he set out, as though he were entering upon a long and dangerous sea-voyage, wherein it was very doubtful if he should ever return.”

When Mrs. Calderwood, of Polton and Coltness, made a journey from Scotland into England in 1756, she wrote a diary, a very much more entertaining and instructive affair than the Reverend Mr. Brome’s book—which, indeed, could have been compiled from other works without the necessity of travelling, and, but for a few fleeting glimpses of original observation, actually gives that impression. Mrs. Calderwood tells us that at Durham she went to see the Cathedral, where the woman who conducted her round the building did not understand her Scottish ways (nor indeed did Mrs. Calderwood comprehend everything English). “I suppose, by my questions, the woman took me for a heathen, as I found she did not know of any other mode of worship but her own; so, that she might not think the Bishop’s chair defiled by my sitting down in it, I told her I was a Christian, though the way of worship in my country differed from hers.” Mrs. Calderwood, quite obviously, had never heard of St. Cuthbert and his antipathy to women, so respected at Durham that womankind were not admitted within certain boundaries in his Cathedral church; nor was she familiar with hassocks, for she narrates how the woman “stared when I asked what the things were that they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.”

The modern tourist along our roads finds a deadly sameness overspreading all parts of the country. The same cheap little suburban houses of stereotyped fashion, built to let at from £25 to £30 a year, that sprawl in mile upon mile on the outer ring of London, are to be found—nay, are insistently to the foreground—wherever he goes. They form the approach to, the outpost of, every town, large or small, he enters, and are built in the same way, and of the same materials, whether he travels farther north, south, east, or west. It was not so, need it be said, in the old times. Then the coach passenger with an eye for the beautiful and the unusual had that sense abundantly gratified along almost every mile of his course, for when men did not build on contract, and when the contractor, had he existed, would not have been able to work outside his own district, there was individuality in building design. We all know the truth of the adage that “variety is charming,” and of variety the travellers had their fill. And not only was there variety in design, but an endless change of materials gratified the eyes of those who cared for these things. London, with its dingy brick, was succeeded, as one penetrated westwards, by the weather-boarded cottages of Brentford and Hounslow, by the timber framing and brick nogging of the next districts, by the chalk and flint of Hampshire and Wilts; and at last, when one had come to the stone country, by the yellow ferruginous sandstone of Ham Hill, that characterises the houses and cottages between Shaftesbury, Crewkerne and Chard. Coming into Devon, the yellow stone was replaced by the rich red sandstone, or the equally red “cob” of that western land; and a final change was found when, the Tamar passed and Plymouth left behind, the massive granite churches, houses and cottages astonished the new-comer to those parts. No one could build with other than local materials in those days. The material might be, like the granite, stubborn and difficult, and expensive to work, but it would have been still more expensive to bring other materials to the spot, and so the local men worked on their local stone, and in course of time acquired that peculiar mastery of it and that way of expressing themselves which originated that “local style” whose secret is so ardently sought by modern architectural students. You cannot transplant the old style of a locality. Like the wilding plucked from its native hedgerow, it dies, or is cultivated into something other than its original old sweet self and becomes artificial. Cynic circumstance has so decreed it that, while these ancient local growths have in modern times been copied in London and the great towns, the rural neighbourhoods have been cursed with an ambition to copy London, while everywhere cheap red brick is ousting the native stone, flint, or wood.

When the fashionables travelled down by coach to Bath, one might safely have offered a prize for every brick house to be found there, for Bath was, and is, built of the local oolite known as “Bath stone.” The prize would never have been claimed; but something like a modern miracle is now happening, for even at Bath red brick has underbid the native stone and gained an entrance.

Nothing escapes the modern desecrating touch. “Auld Reekie” itself—Edinburgh, that last stronghold of the Has Been—is not the same “beloved town” that Sir Walter Scott knew. The French Renaissance character of its grandiose new buildings does not alone tend to change it into something alien to sentiment and ancient recollection; but that which our ancestors would have thought a mere impossibility, that which themselves would, and ourselves should, stigmatise as a crime committed against History and the Picturesque, has almost come to pass. In short, the deep ravine where the Nor’ Loch stagnated of old, where the Waverley Station is now placed, has been deprived of something of its apparent depth, and the Castle Rock of a corresponding height, by the towering proportions of the vast buildings that fill up the valley and desecrate the site of the northern capital.

Sturdy survivals of olden days are the local delicacies that first obtained a wider fame from that time when they were set before the coach passengers at the country inns where the coach dined, or had tea, or supped, and were so greatly appreciated that supplies were carried away for the benefit of distant friends. Some, however, of these delicacies have disappeared. No longer does Grantham produce the cakes mentioned by Thoresby in 1683. Grantham, he says, was “famous in his esteem for Bishop Fox’s benefactions, but it is chiefly noted of travellers for a peculiar sort of thin cake, called ‘Grantham Whetstones.’” What precisely were the cakes known by this unpromising name we cannot say, for the making of them is a thing of the past.

Stilton cheese, never made at Stilton, obtained its name exactly in the manner already described. It was a cheese made at Wymondham, in Leicestershire, but its merits were first discovered by the coach-parties who dined at the “Bell” at Stilton, whose landlord obtained his supply from Wymondham, and drove a roaring trade in old cheeses sold to the coaches to take away. “Stilton” cheese is now only a conventional name, like that of “Axminster” carpets, made nowadays at Kidderminster.

To bring home with him bags and boxes of local delicacies was to the old coach-traveller as much an earnest of his travels as the bringing back of a storied alpenstock is to the tourist in Switzerland. The Londoner, returning home from Edinburgh, could come back laden with a number of things which, easily obtainable now, were then the spoils only of travel. From Scotch shortbread the list would range to Doncaster butterscotch, York hams, Grantham gingerbread, and Stilton cheeses. On other roads he might secure the cloying Banbury cake, still extant, and as sickly-sweet and lavish of currants as of yore; the famous Shrewsbury cakes, manufactured by the immortal Pailin, who left his recipe behind him, so that the cakes of Shrewsbury still continue in the land; Bath buns, phenomenally adhesive and sprinkled with those fragments of loaf sugar without which the exterior of no Bath bun is complete; the cheese of Cheddar; the toffee of Everton; pork pies from Melton Mowbray; or a barrel of real natives from Whitstable. All or any of these, I say, he might carry home with him, while few places were so unimportant in this particular way that he could not ring the changes on gastronomic rarities as he went.

All these things were the products of that old English tradition of good cheer and hospitality which lasted even some little way into the railway age. Journeys were cold, but hearts were warm, and the more rigorous your travelling the better your welcome. It would seem, and actually be, absurd to surround a modern arrival by railway with the circumstance that greeted the advent of the coach. In the bygone times the guest had no sooner alighted at his inn and proceeded to his room than a knock came at his door, and lo! on a tray a glass of the choicest port or cordial the house contained. To this day the courteous old custom survives at the “Three Tuns,” in Durham, whose traditional glass of cherry brandy is famous the whole length of the great road to the north.

For the little folks who travelled by coach, either with their own people or, like Tom Brown, in charge of the guard, warm motherly hearts beat in the bosoms of the stately landladies of the age, all courteous punctilio to their grown-up guests, but sympathy itself to the wearied youngsters. Such was Mrs. Botham, of the “Pelican,” at Speenhamland, on the Bath Road—that “Pelican” of whose “enormous bill” some waggish poet had sung at an early period. Mrs. Botham, an awesome figure—like Mrs. Ann Nelson, of the “Bull,” Whitechapel, dressed in black satin—unbent to the youngsters, for whom, indeed, she had always ready a packet of brandy-snaps.

The earlier travellers were even more welcomed, not by the innkeepers alone, whose welcome was not altogether altruistic, but by the country folk in general.

The annual reappearance of the early stage-coaches was a much greater event to the villagers and townsfolk of the more remote shires than we moderns might suppose, or feel inclined to believe, without inquiry. But we must consider the winter isolation of such places in those remote times, and then some faint glimmering sense of their aloofness from the world will give us an understanding of the relief with which they again saw real strangers from the outer world. In the long winter months, when days were short and roads only to be travelled by the most daring horsemen, spurred to the rash deed only by the most urgent necessity, the passing stranger was rare, and excited remark, and the company in the inn parlour or by the ingle-nook discussed him, both because of his rarity and by reason of their own raw material for the making of conversation being run very low indeed. We should be more thankful than we generally are that our lot was not cast in a seventeenth-century village, for winter in such surroundings was dulness incarnate. Because they could not obtain fodder to keep the sheep and cattle in good condition through the winter, the farmers and graziers of that time killed them before that season set in, and the villagers lived upon salted meat. Every house had its salt-beef tub and its bacon-cratch under the kitchen ceiling, well stocked with hams and sides; but vegetables were so scarce as to be practically unobtainable.

Every household brewed its own beer and kept a stock of cider, and most housewives were cunning in the preparation of metheglin, a sickly-sweet and heavy drink that revolts the modern palate, but was then greatly appreciated. Evenings were not long, even though it grew dark before four o’clock, for folks went to bed by seven or eight. There was little inducement to sit up late, because only the feeblest illumination was possible to any but the very rich, and the yeomen, the farmers and the cottagers had to rest content with the dim sputtering glimmer of the tallow dips that every eight or ten minutes required the attentions of the snuffers. “When the night cometh,” we read in the Bible, “no man can work”; but that is a statement which, literally true at the time when the Bible was done into English, can now only be read and understood figuratively. No one could work by the artificial illumination then possible.

Conceive, then, the joy with which returning spring was greeted—spring, that brought back light and fresh food and intercourse with the world, outside the rural parish. Mankind had travelled far from those prehistoric times of annual terror, when the ignorant savage saw the sun’s light going out with the coming of winter, and so, with abject fear, passed the darkling months until the vernal solstice brought him hope again. No one in the Old England of two hundred and fifty years ago trembled lest the sun should not return at his appointed time; but when the sap rose and the birds began to sing again, and warmth and light had begun to replace the fogs and mists of winter, the hearts of all rejoiced.

May Day was then the great merrymaking festival, but the first coach that ventured along the roads, now beginning to set after the winter’s rains, had a welcome of its own. At Sutton-on-Trent, on the Great North Road, the springtide custom of welcoming the early coaches was royally observed, and kept up for many years. No coach, during a whole week of jollity, was suffered to proceed through that jovial village without it halted and ate and drank as only Englishmen could then drink and eat. Guards, coachmen and passengers were freely feasted, willy-nilly. Young and old plied them with the good things, spread out upon a tray covered with a beautiful damask napkin, and heaped with plum-cakes, tartlets, gingerbread, and exquisite home-made bread and biscuits; while ale, currant and gooseberry wines, cherry brandy, and occasionally spirits, were eagerly pressed upon the strangers. Half a dozen damsels, all enchanting young people, neatly clad, rather shy, but courteously importunate, plied the passengers.

Thoresby records a similar custom at Grantham, near by, on one of his journeys. Under date of May 4th, 1714, he says: “We dined at Grantham, and had the usual solemnity, being the first passage of the coach this season; the coachman and horses decked with ribbons and flowers, and the town music and young people in couples before us.” The “town music” was what we should nowadays call the Town Band.

When such courtesies obtained along the roads the coachmen and guards would have been churlish not to have, in some prominently visible manner, done honour to the season. And, indeed, May Day and springtime decorations were features on most coaches. The coachman’s whipstock was ornamented with gay ribbons and bunches of flowers, while the coachman himself wore a floral nosegay that rivalled a prize cabbage in size. The guard was no less remarkable a figure, and his horn was wreathed with the most lively display of blossoms. Festoons of flowers and sprays of evergreens so draped and covered the coach that the insides, peering out upon the festivities, very closely resembled those antic figures, the “Jacks-in-the-Green,” that used on May Day to prance and make merry from the midst of an embowering canopy of foliage, even so late as thirty years ago, in London streets. The horses, too, bore their part. Their new harness and saddle-cloths, the rosettes and wreaths of laurel on their heads, smartened them up so that even the animals themselves were conscious of the occasion, and bore themselves with becoming pride.

Those old customs are, as a matter of course, gone. Coaches no longer dash through the old “thoroughfare” villages; and when, with the advent of spring, the motorist appears upon the road, the villagers, rather than welcoming his appearance, curse him for the clouds of dust he leaves behind. Motor-cars, they tell us, are to repeople the old coaching-roads, whose prosperity is, through them, to return, and the picturesque old wayside inns, with their memories of the coaching age, are to once again experience the rush of business. It may be so, but no one will regret the fact more than the lover of Old England, who, in the repeopling of the roads, sees their modernising inevitable, and the equally inevitable bringing “up to date” of those quaint, quiet, and comfortable hostelries so dear to the genuine tourist. It is true, they do not dine you elaborately—as your extravagant motorist complains—but life is not all chicken and champagne, and it will be a sorry day when the plain man, fleeing the gaudy glories of hotels at fashionable resorts, finds the unsophisticated inns of the countryside remodelled on the same plan. Already the picturesqueness of the old roads is threatened. They are, if you please, too hilly, too narrow, or not straight enough for that new tyrant of the highways, the owner of a high-powered motor-car, and plans have actually been drawn up by irresponsible busybodies for straight and broad new tracks, or for the remodelling of the old roads on the same principle. Roadside trees and avenues keep the surface damp and muddy after rain, and so, as rubber-tyred cars are apt to skid and side-slip on mud, the same voices call for the abolition of wayside trees. Old England is in a parlous state, when these things can be advocated and no indignant protests rise.